Budget Gaming PC

PayAdmin

As the title says, I'm looking to build my first gaming PC. I've been playing on a 15" laptop since forever. Recently I made a decision to buy a monitor so I can finally have bigger display. The monitor is 144hz (BenQ Zowie XL2411). However as you may have guessed, this doesn't really matter since my laptop can't support this refresh rate. This combined with the pretty poor setup (see picture) I have made me decide it's time for an upgrade.

@Arya put something together on pcpartpicker which I really liked (thanks again Arya!) But the price is a bit too high for my budget.

I'm looking for something budget friendly yet 'decent'. Of course I'm not looking to play PUBG in high fps and quality, I'm a CSGO and GTA V online player. If I decide to play heavier games in the future I can always upgrade my rig when needed and if I have the money for it.

I have some basic knowledge about hardware but it's not enough to know which parts to pick/which are needed and which aren't/if things go together or not/... So I'm hoping you guy could give me a hand. I have read other threads ofcourse but new year, new market so maybe things have changed? I have seen the 'AMD or Intel' question a lot. I would answer this but as I said before, my knowledge is only basic on what components do but not what the difference is between them.

Budget: 600-650 euros

Something between that would be really great. as said before, I'm not looking for a high-end thing. Running CSGO smoothly and GTA V would already be a huge help

Thank in advance!
~Green

The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong, if we do not feel right. - William Hazlitt

It's really difficult to get good prices for Belgium on pcpartpicker. It seems there are only 2 online stores selling PC parts

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@Nomy Thanks in advance! We have other stores in Belgium specialized in computer hardware. So you don't have to look on the Belgian pcpartpicker. If other countries have more choice it'd be great to get another build from the US site maybe. Getting the parts in my hands isn't a problem so the location doesn't matter that much.

The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong, if we do not feel right. - William Hazlitt

Super Admin]HeLL[ Member

The thing is, you wont be able to find it in store or the price might be way off.

Here is one on UK PCPartPicker after swapping a few things: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/zfCDCy
Notice that you could get GTX1050Ti cheaper in UK than if you got GTX1050 in Belgium.
£580.50 (666.48 euros)

And here is one for US PCPartPicker: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/dQJtxY
I seriously doubt you will get all the parts or get similar prices. Some parts on newegg.com seem to have cashback offer.
$658.24 (531.27 euros) Or 575.67 euros without cashback.

PayAdmin

Thanks for the advice! I could be able to crank my budget up to 850 euro but I'll wait until the end of the month and continue doing some research. I'll keep you guys updated on any changes or decisions! (poor student life is a hard life)

The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong, if we do not feel right. - William Hazlitt

PayAdmin

So the people who responded to this thread already know I cranked up my budget (a lot). I have finished choosing my parts but @PASi and I started talking about the GPU and we both got kinda stuck between choosing from the following 2:

Besides memory size I don't see any significant differences? The reason this caught my eye is mainly the price. The 3G is cheaper and could save me at least 50 euros. Now the question is, should I go for the 3G or do you think the 50 euros are worth the upgrade? Different opinions would be handy and nice to read!

Chances are high I will start buying my components this weekend so I can start building using a tutorial I found on the web.

The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong, if we do not feel right. - William Hazlitt

PayAdmin

If it's worth doing it's worth overdoing. For the sake of €50 i think you'd be mad not to go for the 6gb. Relative to how much youre spending on the graphics card anyway, €50 isn't too much more to double the memory (which, as far as I'm aware, you cant just stick in another 3gb at a later time like you can with ram).
I know and understand that saving money where you can is important in a build, but think when you're a few months down the road, you could be kicking yourself you didn't go for it for the sake of 50 extra.
My opinion is you should Bury the hatchet and go for the 6gb, youll thank yourself for it in the long run.

I think you should get a 1tb HDD atleast, 250 isnt really enough unless you only play a couple of games, i don't remember exacly but windows takes atleast 50gb from memory space.It's nice to have windows on SSD and the the games you play the most that benefit from faster loading times and the rest on your HDD.
About the VRAM on the gpu it depends on what you play, if you play modded skyrim for example you will benefit from it but even that not a single game goes over 4gb of vram on 1080p and barely any go over 3gb it all depends on how safe you wanna feel for the future.
Lastly i used to run with 8gb on ram but it really isnt enough anymore i would suggest you go for a 2x8 kit if you get the 3gb 1060 instead or just save a little bit more.

PayAdmin

@iCeMan! I already ordered the 6GB GPU to avoid killing myself in the future like @Senorpedro97 said.
Reason for going with only 8GB memory is purely my budget. I'm going way over what I should be spending so I'm saving where possible. I can always add extra memory so I picked 8GB to start with. I currently have 250GB on my laptop and I have 50GB left so that shouldn't be an issue. I only play css, csgo and now and then gta v. No music, videos, heavy programs at the moment. When needed I will buy an extra HDD but doing it now would mean spending money I can just save to be fair..

The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong, if we do not feel right. - William Hazlitt

8GB ram is way more than enough. No game is gonna go beyond that, you really only need more ram if you're planning on like multitasking rendering heavy stuff and gaming. The important thing is the frequency of the ram (mhz), which is basically the speed at which the ram operates.

Super Admin]HeLL[ Member

8GB ram is way more than enough. No game is gonna go beyond that, you really only need more ram if you're planning on like multitasking rendering heavy stuff and gaming. The important thing is the frequency of the ram (mhz), which is basically the speed at which the ram operates.

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Until someone who has 16Gig of ram come here and say you need 16GB as minimum now! just cause they dont wanna feel like they wasted their money for extra ram they would never use xd

Super Admin]HeLL[ Member

It depends really. If you open a crazy amount of Chrome tabs and run games without closing Chrome then I think 16GB is the minimum for you. Because when you run out of ram, programs start using page file which is on your HardDisk or SSD which is a lot slower than RAM. This can cause lags and crashes most of the times.

It depends really. If you open a crazy amount of Chrome tabs and run games without closing Chrome then I think 16GB is the minimum for you. Because when you run out of ram, programs start using page file which is on your HardDisk or SSD which is a lot slower than RAM. This can cause lags and crashes most of the times.

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Unless you keep 25+ tabs of chrome open while playing 2 games at the same time you won't need more than 8Gb.

PayAdmin

I generally close everything when I game or have 1 chrome tab open and I'm planning on adding an extra 8gb in the (not near) future.

Update: I will start the build tomorrow evening and the setup the same evening aswell. I found a nice youtube tutorial with the same case, motherboard and cpu so that's nice.

The guy at the store told me I should update BIOS when I first start up but I should be fine there.
Only thing I'm worrying about is the internet and OS so that might become a problem tomorrow at the setup.

The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong, if we do not feel right. - William Hazlitt

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